ABSTRACT
This chapter will analyse the work of three experimental theatre artists. Their work can be seen to straddle theatre and live art forms and employ the self-reflexive tendency associated with postmodern performance. On one level their work can be read as an attempt to demystify the representational apparatus of realist theatre and its Aristotelian legacy and on another point to illustrate the discursive construction of selfhood and identity. I will analyse three examples: Number 1, The Plaza by GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN (2013); Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company (2014) and Notorious by The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein (2017). I will argue that my chosen artists deliberately create a productive tension between the displayed body and the authorial voice. They frame normative images of male and female characters in an ironic manner whilst foregrounding a failure to meet social expectation. I will argue that each production adopts an ironic, self-reflexive attitude in keeping with what Liz Tomlin has called a ‘healthy scepticism’ appropriate to deconstructive theatre whilst demonstrating that their experience of female subjectivity is shaped by a multitude of competing social forces (Tomlin 2008: 357). I will draw upon Lydia Rainford’s sense of irony as a mode of ‘radical negativity’; according to Rainford irony ‘refuses to be contained in discrete moments of speech or narrative’ (Rainford 2005: 7).
